Jimmy Garoppolo’s Diet Once Earned Him The Nickname ‘Leaves’

Jimmy Garoppolo’s diet

Jimmy Garoppolo’s diet earned him the nickname “Leaves” thanks to his almost penchant for chicken, spinach, and rice as detailed in an article published by Bleacher Report in 2018.

And while he took a lot of advice from Tom Brady, Garoppolo’s meal plan didn’t include the famous (or infamous?) avocado ice cream the veteran (now retired) quarterback embraced as a “modern interpretation of ice cream” that is “just as delicious but much healthier” in his TB12 diet plan. “I haven’t adopted the avocado ice cream yet, I’m still on an all-natural ice cream diet,” Garoppolo joked to WEEI’s The Dennis and Callahan Show in 2016. Though, he did tell Bleacher Report that the dairy-free dessert was “not bad”.

In Muscle And Fitness, Garoppolo detailed what he keeps in his game-day bag, including a surprising piece of nostalgia: Big League Chew bubblegum. “My brothers have a long supply of this stuff. It’s one of those things where we’re playing a kid’s game. You have to remember you’re supposed to be out there having fun. The Big League Chew just kind of brings me back to that little kid mindset every now and then,” he said.

He continued, detailing another must-have product: “I really didn’t get into the hydration component until about my fourth year in the league. I remember seeing Tom [Brady] with the electrolytes and he would always be drinking those things. As a young player, you don’t think you need it, and you can just get by without it. As you get older in this game, you need every little advantage.”

Tom Brady’s diet

The Tom Brady diet, also known as the TB12 Method, is a plant-based diet that focuses on whole foods, with an emphasis on organic, locally grown and seasonal produce. Tom—who introduced the diet in his 2017 book, The TB12 Method: How to Do What You Love, Better and for Longer—credits the plan for his longevity in his professional football career and helping him lower the risk of injuries and minimize inflammation while improving his athletic performance, energy levels, recovery and health as a whole. 

“At TB12, balance is as much about creating the right mixture of strength, conditioning, and pliability as it is about lifestyle choices—what we eat, how much rest and recovery we get, and what daily activities we engage in,” Tom wrote in the book. “The more balanced we are, the better. In my experience, most athletes like to work on things that they’re already good at. It reinforces their confidence in their own abilities. Strong athletes like to work on strength, and fast athletes like to work on speed. But that doesn’t create balance. To create balance, we need to work on our deficiencies as well.”

In an interview with Boston.com in 2016, Tom’s personal chef, Allen Campbell, confirmed that he cooked the former NFL player and his family—including then-wife Gisele Bündchen and their kids John, Vivian and Benjamin—a local, organic and majority plant-based diet. “My philosophy starts in my own life, and with my own lifestyle and eating habits. I make conscious decisions to buy local and organic, and to stay away from GMOs, and to think about the future of the planet and the future of humans,” Campbell said. “I took a plant-based nutrition course earlier this year. It was an online course through Cornell, and it’s taught by a doctor named T. Colin Campbell, who’s behind The China Study. My philosophy is that a plant-based diet has the power to reverse and prevent disease.”

Campbell also confirmed that Tom ate an 80/20 diet consisting of 80 percent plant-based foods and 20 percent meats with minimal added sugars and carbohydrates. “So, 80 percent of what they eat is vegetables. [I buy] the freshest vegetables,”he said. “If it’s not organic, I don’t use it. And whole grains: brown rice, quinoa, millet, beans. The other 20 percent is lean meats: grass-fed organic steak, duck every now and then, and chicken. As for fish, I mostly cook wild salmon. It’s very different than a traditional American diet. But if you just eat sugar and carbs—which a lot of people do—your body is so acidic, and that causes disease. Tom recently outed Frosted Flakes and Coca-Cola on WEEI. I love that he did that. Sugar is the death of people.”

The TB12 Method by Tom Brady

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission from the sale.